Resolving Out of Gamut Colors

Quality profiles yield very little color shift with the "Relative Colorimetric" rendering intent. But no profile can perfectly resolve the printing of "unprintable" colors; that is, out of gamut colors.

Out of gamut colors simply cannot be rendered by your print on the target paper - deal with it. If you take the trouble to print with profiles, you should work to resolve out of gamut colors manually:

1 Display the out of gamut colors by selecting View>Gamut Warning. As illustrated, pixels that contain colors out of gamut display with a gray

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overlay. If no pixels display gray, or if there are only a few "speckles" of gray on the image, don't worry about the gamut and print the image.

If there are large areas of solid gray in the image, shift these colors to printable colors. Printing an image with large areas of out of gamut colors results in an image with large patches of solid color.

2 Use the Replace Color tool to shift out of gamut colors. Select Image>Adjustments>Replace Color...

Move the cursor over the image and click on one of the large patches of gray. This makes the out of gamut color the Color at the top of the Replace Color dialog.

Next, select a color in gamut to replace this color. Click on the color square for the Result color. This brings up the Color Picker. Move the cursor over the image and click on a color that is similar to the out of gamut color, but in gamut. When you click on a replacement color, the gray of the gamut warning dramatically reduces. Try a few colors to see which color provides the best result. Click OK to close the dialog.

5 It's important to preview the change. Select Undo/Redo Tctrrn +Z) a couple of times to turn the replace color change on and off.

6 Finally, reduce the effect of the Replace Color tool to as low a value as possible. Select Edit> Fade Replace Color. Reduce the opacity of the Fade until the gamut warning begins to appear again. It's best to print with some gamut warning, so you're printing right at the edge of the gamut and taking advantage of the full range of printable colors.

It is possible that you will need to perform the Replace Color adjustment more than once for different colors. Repeat these steps until the gray of the gamut warning is reduced to a mere speckle.